Hot and Spicy Vegetable Chili Recipe

Hi I am Betty, welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today we are making Vegetable Chilli, I have already made chilli once for all of you and it is the standard chilli that I make for my family. And it has evolved over a period of 40 years; actually Rick was the first one to make chilli in our family. And he does cook a lot of things but I was working right through my 40 years ago and I came home from a long day of work which is cool. And he had this chilli ready for me, so we took that recipe and just start changing it, adding all, typing out a little in increasing amounts. Decreasing amounts and we came up with the chilli that you will find posted already on Betty’s Kitchen.

And I always make it like that because that what my family likes. But I think some of you out there would like to have some chilli. That doesn’t have meat in it and we also want to have that occasionally as well. So I am going to show you how to make vegetable chilli, so we start with few vegetables that are going to be sauted. So I got my skillet here, ready to put some oil in and this is blended oil. It is a blend of canola and vegetable oil, you could use olive oil or just pure vegetable oil, pure canola oil - any of those would be fine, it’s two tablespoons. That you are going to put into your large skillet or deep skillet.

Actually I am going to use this with the chilli, for the cooking of the chilli. So I wanted something that would hold all of these things that I would be adding later. So next comes onion and we have chopped onion and this one and one half cups of chopped onion. Or thereabouts any of these can vary a little bit; this is what may call a lot of difference. And I have white onion, you can use yellow or white - doesn’t matter, one and one half cups. Then for bell pepper, you can use green or you can use the red or you can use combination which is what I am doing here.

All together you will need about one and 1/4 and one and 1/3 cups. So I decided to do 2/3 cup of green bell pepper and 2/3 cup of red bell pepper. That gives it a little bit different flavors because the red bell pepper is a little sweeter and also like gives a nice coloring to the finished chilli. And then we have celery, 1/2 cup chopped celery; you can see why this is called vegetable chilli. I could call it vegetarian chilli a lot of them are named that but I think I will name this Vegetable Chilli. Now I have one clove, it is a large clove of garlic that has been minced.

And that where I stop and go to the stove and saute all of this. So I think we are ready here to enlarge them. Something that you need is to stir this around; it is a beautiful combination of vegetables. And we are going to go right over to the stove, turn the heat on and start sauteing. When this is tender and clear - then we will add the other ingredients. Our vegetables are sauted and tender, it’s about to turn this off and bring this over. And let you see what they look like, you can say there is kind of clear, beginning to brown up and caramelize. And that is a nice look for them and it is just between five and 10 minutes with me. Just to leisure lane stirring them, now I am going to be adding some tomato and I will say that I have a can here. This is a 14.5 ounce can, tomatoes in juice that are diced.

So if in your product is perfect, if you just get whole tomatoes then you can put some kitchen shoes down inside. And just cut and they we will be diced well enough but more on the juice and all in here. Two cans -- diced can tomatoes, they don’t have any flavoring other than I am sure they have been salted.

And they might have some other additives but I would let you put in like an Italian style or something that would conflict. With the flavors that we are going to be adding because we are adding some nice chilli powder. I am adding two tablespoons of chilli powder - here they go. Here is one of them and here is the other tablespoon. You can use any brand you like, I usually I am making a bigger pot of chilli and use a lot of chilli powder. And I typically will get out for different brands just because I like the mixture of it.

We got our chilli powder in here and we got cumin, this will be two teaspoons. So one teaspoon and the second teaspoon of brown cumin, these are two lovely flavors to put into any kind of mix kind of style dish. And then here we have some ground red pepper, I got 1/2 teaspoon if you are alone afraid of the hot stuff. Then don’t put that much, you can do a quarter of a teaspoon or you can just leave it out. But I think this will spice them a bit, I think they will enjoy it. Now comes the beans and this is going to be a little unusual, I have two cans of beans sitting here and they are pinto beans. You will see this one is still full and it’s 15 ounces so you pour that in, choose a knife and that is one of them.

The other one you will see is empty, that is because it is over here. What I have I done is just take the beans, juice in all and I put it in a blender and it just the can of beans. Nothing else it is not worth it and I set to liquify which is the highest level. And then it is off now but when I turned it on - I will just give you a short demonstration. Because it is noisy you can see it sort of purees what is in there and that is going to help to fill lot with our texture. And if you don’t want to go to this trouble, what you can do is just use a can of refried beans. And that will be good for the consistency so you can have one can of regular pinto beans and then one can of refried beans.

I usually use refried beans as part of the beans in my regular chilli. But you see how different that is from the other can of beans wrap beside it right there. The actual base, this is in order to just get all of those flavors to meld together. And that will happen when this goes over the heat, so I am going to stir this up and put over - most on medium heat until it comes to a boil. And then we will turn it down and let it cook and only needs about 30 minutes to cook. You wanted to get the right consistency so if it is too runny you know that it is not ready. You want it to jell up a bit but also you want those flavors to mingle, so give it at least 30 minutes. And then check to see how it is doing and you may want to give it more.

But I want to make just my normal chilli with the beef in it. I usually cook it for about four hours but there is a lot more to that chilli. This is very quick and easy to put together, if I hadn’t done so much talking today. This would be a five minute dish, so I will just open the stove; we are going to cook it for 30 minutes. And we will see what it looks like at the end, I think it needs more. Then I will give more time, but I will come back and show you the finished results and tell you how I cook.

Our chilli has been cooking for 30 minutes and you can see the consistency on how it is sticking that below bit since we started. And I think I will just go and turn it off and serve that. If you want to leave it longer, it is not going to hurt it, it will just be thicker. So bring it over here, there are couples of things I like to mention, always taste my chilli while it is cooking to see if it needs more salt. This did not have any salt added at the beginning so right when I came to a bowl I tasted it and added a 1/2 teaspoon of salt. And then after they cooked quite a bit, and someone stand, I tasted again. It -- the salt so I did another 1/2 teaspoon of salt so you can consider that there should be maybe one teaspoon of salt in this recipe to taste really good.

As far as the red pepper, the ground red pepper, I put 1/2 teaspoon in here. It is very hot, so if you are not in too that changes that to 1/4 teaspoon or just leaves it out. Because there is chilli powder and cumin that plenty of spice, now when you serve this you might want to bowl or mug. And you might choose just salting crackers and I like to use sliced - this is sharp cheddar sliced cheese. Something likes that, it is just good to go with the flavor, but this time I think I am just going to put it in the mug. From directly from the skillet, it is all messy to do if it is by - I actually should have a little but it wasn’t a slide in spoon. We got a little bit of drip coming down on the side - we will pretend that it is not there and well have here is some Mexican corn bread. Which I showed you how to make a couple of weeks ago, so if you are interested in that just look at my recipe for Mexican Corn Bread. It goes really well with butter and then a nice bowl or mug of chilli and your glass of nice tea as well.